Hanford cleanup cost soars to $11.3 billion ... if Congress will pay

By LISA STIFFLER AND CHARLES POPE, P-I REPORTERS

Published 10:00 pm, Sunday, April 30, 2006

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These double-walled tanks at Hanford each hold 1 million gallons of highly radioactive nuclear waste from bomb making. Built in 1984, they were later covered with 5 feet of dirt. The liquid waste that's inside them is slated to be pumped out and turned into glass. less

These double-walled tanks at Hanford each hold 1 million gallons of highly radioactive nuclear waste from bomb making. Built in 1984, they were later covered with 5 feet of dirt. The liquid waste that's inside ... more

Photo: /P-I File

Hanford cleanup cost soars to $11.3 billion ... if Congress will pay

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It's costing Americans $1.4 million a day to build a facility to safely treat millions of gallons of radioactive and toxic waste stored in the Hanford Nuclear Reservation's leak-prone underground tanks.

When the project is completed, the bill could total $38 for every man, woman and child in the nation -- that's if the $11.3 billion price tag doesn't swell even further. It has nearly tripled in less than six years, making it a massive taxpayer burden.

This is a critical time for the project. An increasingly impatient Congress is now deciding how much money to contribute to the effort -- considered the most important step in the cleanup of the sprawling desert site on the Columbia River. Some fear lawmakers could simply wash their hands of it and walk away.

"The whole house of cards is ready to collapse," said Gerald Pollet, director of Heart of America Northwest, a Hanford watchdog group.

The challenge of safely disposing of 53 million gallons of deadly waste left over from decades of plutonium production has caused the U.S. Department of Energy and its contractors to stumble repeatedly.

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Weak -- even negligent -- management has pushed the project's completion from 2011 back to 2017 or later and driven costs up by billions, according to reports from government agencies, the Army Corps of Engineers and watchdog groups.

At the same time, environmental and health risks are mounting. The corrosive waste weakens the walls of the tanks and the risk of leaks keeps growing, regulators admit.

The federal officials running the Hanford cleanup and their contractors apologize for the delays and errors in cost calculations. They promise to do better.

"Everything that I do on this project each day is to identify with certainty what the costs and schedule basis is, and to restore confidence and credibility in this project," said John Eschenberg, the Energy Department's manager for the project.

Construction is under way on the massive "vitrification" project, which one day would turn the waste into a glassy compound that will trap the radioactive material for safe storage. But the department's contractor -- construction giant Bechtel National Inc. -- has had to put the brakes on most of the building due to safety and technical problems.

Countless additional factors have helped drive up costs. They include the initial miscalculation of the amount and cost of materials needed for the project and underestimation of the technical and regulatory hurdles facing the facility. In March, a team of experts identified more than two dozen issues that could prevent the plant from working as planned. The plant was expected to operate for nearly two decades.

The mounting setbacks have sent state leaders recently to Washington, D.C., to beseech lawmakers to keep funding the costly endeavor near Richland.

Next week government officials will come to Seattle to explain publicly how much money is needed to support the Hanford cleanup, including the vitrification project, and to get feedback on where it's being spent.

The case is getting harder to make. Some worry Congress or the Energy Department could scrap the vitrification project, perhaps opting to build new storage tanks and putting the waste there. Another option is using a cheaper, but less safe, technology for treating the waste plaguing Hanford -- a key player in World War II's Manhattan Project.

Comments at an April 6 congressional hearing examining Hanford's problems heightened that fear.

"I'm convinced now that after learning about the failures of project management, the neglect of nuclear safety quality assurances and the uncontrollable costs we will hear about today that this project is on a fast road to failure," said Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio.

Hobson's dark opinion is important because he chairs the subcommittee providing money for cleaning up Hanford and other Energy Department plants.

Everyone agrees the project is challenging. In the decades since Hanford fired up the first reactor in 1944, a mishmash of waste has been dumped into 177 tanks in the quest for weapons-grade plutonium. The tanks -- which some say may have leaked recently -- store millions of gallons of chemically complex liquids, sludge and chunky salt cake.

Those responsible for problems with the vitrification project frequently put much of the blame on its unique nature.

"After all, it was a first of a kind, never been built anywhere in the world, much less in the United States," Tom Hash, Bechtel's president of systems and infrastructure, told Hobson's subcommittee.

That statement, however, was not entirely accurate.

Savannah River echoes

Hanford isn't the Energy Department's only radioactive headache.

South Carolina's Savannah River Site was established in the early 1950s to produce plutonium and radioactive hydrogen to arm nuclear weapons.

In 1983, the department began the process of building a vitrification plant there to treat 37 million gallons of dangerous waste that also had been stored in buried, leak-prone tanks.

At Savannah River, just as at Hanford, Bechtel was a prime partner in building the facility.

And just as at Hanford, the project was beset by major cost overruns, poor management and technical problems.

In a 1992 report that is similar in tone and findings to recent reviews of the Hanford project, the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) itemized the problems. The cost, the GAO said, had soared from an estimated $2.1 billion to $4 billion. The project fell behind schedule.

Ineffective management "has been a principal factor contributing to the tremendous cost growth of the (waste facility) program and the schedule delays," reported the government investigators.

"Other factors, such as system testing that identified technical problems and equipment and design deficiencies" also affected the program's cost and schedule, the GAO said.

As with Hanford, DOE officials and the contractors repented and vowed to do better.

The plant finally opened in 1996 -- three years late. It has produced 2,200 canisters of glassified waste since then, but lingering technical problems have limited its effectiveness, allowing the capture of only small amounts of radioactive material per canister. DOE estimates the plant will finish the job in 2026.

Savannah River has struggled to develop a process that separates high-level waste from less lethal, low-level waste. Once the process works, it will speed cleanup because only the worst waste will be sent to the vitrification plant. A citizens advisory board said last month that the delay could add $1 billion to cleanup costs.

While concerns raised about the operations are disturbingly similar, some say comparisons between Hanford and Savannah River are unfair because the Washington operation is much larger and more complicated.

John Britton, spokesman for Bechtel's Hanford project, said of Savannah: "It's a very small plant in comparison."

'Ready, shoot, aim'

Not long before the first drop of concrete was poured at Hanford's vitrification plant in the summer of 2002, the desert site was flush with optimism.

"This really is a watershed year," said Harry Boston, the Energy Department's manager for the project at the time. "A lot of hard work has been done over many years and now we are in a position to reap the rewards."

Today, construction essentially has stopped on two of the vitrification project's three main facilities. While 1,700 builders bustled there a year ago, that number has withered to about 375.

The project has embraced a "design-build" strategy in which chunks of the facility are engineered and construction starts before the overall blueprint is completed. Critics call it the "ready, shoot, aim" approach, but supporters say it's a smart, accepted practice.

Engineering problems have plagued the effort over the years.

Last year, the government finally heeded earthquake-related concerns raised in 2002 by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board -- the independent government board charged with monitoring DOE programs. That again forced Bechtel engineers to review their plans to make sure the facility could withstand a potential temblor.

Construction already had started, but because the plans were "conservative," Britton said, "we haven't had to tear anything down or do anything over."

But fixes to some of the equipment may be necessary, said A.J. Eggenberger, the board's chairman. And more information about the area's earthquake potential is still needed, he said at last month's subcommittee hearing, resulting in "continued uncertainty."

That keeps the cost estimates and timelines for completion on shaky ground.

Bechtel's original contract was for a $4.3 billion project -- a figure that has ballooned since 2000, topping $11.3 billion.

The causes for the price inflation and delays are many. First, the initial cost estimates were too low. Bechtel officials admit they overestimated the potential productivity of workers and engineers, failing to account for the decades that had passed since a large-scale, U.S. nuclear project was launched. The cost of concrete and steel shot up globally since the effort started. Original expectations for the amount of materials needed also were too low. The project underestimated technical challenges. The list goes on.

To help correct for the setbacks, watchdogs are calling for more outside oversight, such as bringing in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission -- the national agency responsible for nuclear safety.

There are calls to back off the design-build approach so that plans are closer to completion before the hammering begins. The GAO recommends that plans are 90 percent finished before building happens. Currently, they're 65 percent complete.

Clearly, something needs to happen to keep Congress on board.

At the April hearing, Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, said Congress was frustrated with Hanford's slow progress, usually driven "after we whack them in some way."

"There's a lot of taxpayer money out here ...," he said. "In the private sector, we're concerned about timeliness, waste of money."

In response to those concerns, Washington state lawmakers and Gov. Christine Gregoire have launched an aggressive charm campaign to calm the nerves of those holding the purse strings. This summer, another analysis is due from the Army Corps that will more definitely set the costs and timing for the project. Many folks are not expecting good news.

"What we can't afford is another cut" in the vitrification plant budget, Gregoire said last week after meeting with Senate leaders and Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. "Every one of these delays costs us time, money and hurts the environment."